The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

New Journalism was a nonfiction literary movement in the 1960s and 1970s that included authors such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, who is frequently cited as the movement’s founder. The New Journalism authors used techniques associated with fiction—including dialogue, character development, and plot arcs–to present their investigative pieces. In style, too, they were influenced by literary fiction of the era. Wolfe, in particular, has been praised for his energetic and creative prose.

Talese’s 1966 article Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, published in Esquire, is sometimes considered the seminal work of the New Journalism. Much like Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Talese’s article eschews objective reporting and focuses on Talese’s involvement in the story as he pursues interviews with the people around Sinatra, who himself refused to be interviewed.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test stands not only as one of the first book-length examples of New Journalism, but also as one its finest. Wolfe’s style throughout the work represents the already mentioned characteristics of New Journalism, but also incorporates passages switching from prose to verse and back again, unique uses of punctuation and italics, stream of consciousness passages, humor, creative use of language, and shifting narrative styles. A good example of Wolfe’s style occurs in his description of the Pranksters’ experience of attending a Beatles concert while on acid:

Ghhhhhhwooooooooowwwwww, it is like the whole thing has snapped, and the whole front section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething mass of little girls waving their arms in the air, this mass of pink arms, it is all you can see, it is like a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles—it is a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles (205).

Subjective experience, not objective reportage, is a hallmark of the New Journalism, and this—along with the reliance on techniques of fiction to create entertaining stories—led to criticisms that the New Journalism degraded journalistic practice, called the priority of truth into question, or used too many manipulations, such as creating composite characters or recreating dialogue from memory. Although the New Journalism as a movement died out in the 1980s, it influenced a host of later movements and authors, including the rise of “literary nonfiction” in the 1990s and such journalists as Bob Woodward, known for extensive passages of recreated dialogue, and Matt Taibbi, who wrote colorful pieces for Rolling Stone between 2004 and 2016.